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With its gondolas and glamour, the Venice Film Festival launches the fall season in high style as stars head to Italy to showcase their much anticipated movies.
For Angelina Jolie that meant kicking off serious Oscar buzz as she tearfully welcomed an eight-minute standing ovation after the Aug. 29 premiere of her biopic Maria, about opera singer Maria Callas. Asked during a press conference how she identified with the legendary diva, Jolie, 49, told reporters that she related “to the part of her that is extremely soft and didn’t have room in the world to be as soft as she truly was and as emotionally open as she truly was.”
Three days later (well after Jolie jetted off to attend the Telluride Film Festival) her ex-husband Brad Pitt, 60, electrified the crowd of screaming fans when he made his red carpet debut with his girlfriend of two years, Ines de Ramon, 34, to celebrate his new thriller Wolfs alongside longtime friend and costar George Clooney.
The night before the premiere, Pitt and de Ramon, who have been together in Europe while the actor shoots his racing film F1, joined Clooney and his wife, Amal, for dinner at Ristorante da Ivo, where they happily joked with fellow diners. As Clooney pretended to be a waiter, “his sidekick was Brad Pitt,” says a guest. “Who will ever believe us?”
Those well-orchestrated, separate presences at the festival could be seen as a master class in keeping the peace. Despite it being nearly eight years since Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt on Sept. 20, 2016, the two, who were ruled legally single in 2019, have yet to finalize the details of their split as they’ve endured a contentious legal battle over finances and custody of their kids Maddox, 23, Pax, 20, Zahara, 19, Shiloh, 18, and 16-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox.
In the past few years, a separate court fight over Château Miraval, the French villa and winery they bought in 2012 for an estimated $60 million, has opened a new public front in their war. The couple launched Miraval wines in 2013, and the first 6,000 bottles of rosé they produced sold out in five hours.
In court filings Pitt claimed Jolie intentionally “sought to inflict harm” on him by selling her half of the wine company to the Stoli Group after their split. Pitt, who did a photo shoot with Clooney at Miraval to promote Wolfs, told GQ that he is “really just trying to enjoy the people that I love around me and just living,” he said. “I don’t know how to not sound cheesy about it, but just the air is fresh and grass is green, and I’ve just kind of become that guy a little bit.”
